For HBO Sports Boss Greenberg, Enough Heat Was Enough

By Charles Jay

Somebody out there wrote a couple of months ago that Ross Greenberg was getting ready to step down as president of HBO Sports, and when it didn’t happen, he took a lot of flak for it.

Now we find out they were actually right (kind of) all along.

Greenberg announced his departure from HBO on Sunday, and said that his mind has actually been made up for the last three or four months.

There is always going to be a question about whether Greenberg left of his own accord. A lot of network execs “resign” only after being told by someone higher up on the food chain that it would be a pretty good idea. Of course, boxing wasn’t the only thing handled by HBO Sports, but it was the so-called “flagship” product, and the most expensive. You can say with some certainty that as IT goes, so goes HBO Sports.

In that respect, HBO had indeed lost some ground to Showtime, which bagged Manny Pacquiao for the pay-per-view fight with Shane Mosley. This comes at a curious time, since HBO is still in the bidding to carry the upcoming fight with Juan Manuel Marquez. Maybe Greenberg’s exit greases the wheels for that to happen. If it doesn’t, you can bet it would make it that much more difficult to come to terms on a fight between Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather (that is, if Mayweather even wanted something like that).

To boot, there is the pending fiasco (financially speaking, that is) of the upcoming Mayweather-Victor Ortiz bout. As the network that had become accustomed to getting all the big fights without question, HBO couldn’t afford to have both Mayweather AND Pacquiao in the Showtime camp, so Mayweather leveraged that into a slot on HBO that will help support his $42 million guarantee.

That’s right – $42 million. HBO isn’t on the hook for that much, of course, but it will serve to drive the price up for future Mayweather fights, and almost certainly would send his demand for a fight with Pacquiao (again, if he even wants it) through the roof.

Then there was the slippery slope created by the association with Golden Boy Promotions, which people in the business considered to be much too cozy. Again, that amounted to the network capitulating to a marquee star that it felt it couldn’t afford to lose. De La Hoya was obviously the brightest light in the boxing universe, with a home at HBO, and he used that beautifully, accumulating the leverage to free himself from a relationship with Bob Arum and, in effect, promote himself.

But De La Hoya wasn’t out to do just that. He did the smart thing, which was to use his position with HBO for all it was worth. He actually started a genuine promotional company, cajoling Greenberg to give him a series of fights on HBO Latino, then landing one date after another on the lead channel, disproportionately so, in the opinion of many. In effect, De La Hoya’s company is a product of Greenberg’s largess. The interesting thing about it was that during this time, Showtime has scaled down its spending on the sport, and wasn’t even bidding for the mega-fights, instead having resigned itself to finding a niche for quality bouts on a lower rung. So there was really nowhere else for De La Hoya to shop, thus making such generosity, in all probability, unnecessary.

Not that it’s the first time HBO has gotten a promoter off and running. As part of its settlement with top boxing exec Lou DiBella (who worked under Seth Abraham for the most part) over a decade ago, it granted DiBella a number of dates on the network and made capital available for him to sign a number of prospects from the 2000 Olympics, including Jermain Taylor and Brian Viloria. So HBO kick-started DiBella Entertainment, though that was part of a straight-ahead negotiation with someone who had previously brought the network to a different level in boxing coverage.

And then there is the mysterious Al Haymon, who has cemented himself as the powerful man in boxing nobody knows, courtesy of Greenberg.

The effect of “leaning” toward one promoter over others, especially in the case of De La Hoya, is that you can get leveraged into overpaying for shows that are below the quality one would expect from your outlet, relative to the marketplace, but you do it in the way of placating an entity that is holding the carrot out front. That was the charge over and over against Greenberg from inside the grapevine.

Whatever the wisdom of some of Greenberg’s calls, what you have to understand about the boxing industry is that it is fraught with jealousy and resentment. Whatever one promoter gets is looked upon as something another DOESN’T get, as the “pie” is rather finite. Those who get so-called “output deals” and the networks who grant them are looked upon with much suspicion. No matter what happens, that is going to be the case. I can’t think of a network in the business of televised boxing that hasn’t been accused of favoritism toward one or more promoters, or of forcing a promoter to work with another promoter in order to get one of the coveted dates.

Also understand that a TV network can, in effect, create promoters out of thin air, while relegating others into oblivion. If a promoter knows he is getting television dates, he can sign more fighters, because he has a reasonable expectation that he is going to be able to fulfill the obligations set forth in a promotional deal. And he will be able to “lock up” the best talent. If he is shut out by the network, the best he can hope to do in the long run is to partner with someone who has a “relationship” with a network exec.

You can imagine there are going to be some squawks about that. And there were.

There’s an old saying in this business: “Fighters come and go, but we’re (promoters, managers, etc.) going to be around for a long time.” These guys really live by that credo. And sooner or later, it can catch up to someone at a network who they perceive to be playing favorites.

With the defection of Pacquiao (albeit not contractual, and perhaps just temporarily), promoters who aren’t hooked up with Golden Boy are certainly looking at Showtime as a viable place they can turn to, and that is not going to reflect on whoever is in the position of “boxing boss” at a place like HBO.

Yes, the whole atmosphere creates something of a minefield out there, and the way Greenberg tells it, that’s a stressful place to be. As someone who handled that kind of position (involved with buying fights) at a casino, I can believe it.

So according to Greenberg, he will now concentrate on making some films, particularly documentaries, an area where he excelled, shepherding a number of outstanding pieces into the network. Of course, I would expect that his “settlement” (what might be known as a “golden parachute” to some) includes placing those docs, or most of them anyway, onto HBO, and that relationship will surely piss off some under-produced filmmakers in a land filled with them.

And then Greenberg can sit back and watch as his successor takes the heat.